Case Study

 Combatting AIDS can be fun—or not?

   

Jessica Eager is a young American working with a group of international interns in the President Clinton AIDS-Awareness Campaign—a US-based educational NGO operating in Africa—that has sent the team out after a slide-show introduction to African culture and instructions to be creative. She thinks she has the perfect approach to getting the word out about condom use to young people in the village of Northern Nigeria. Remembering how AIDS education was effectively conducted when she was in college in Santa Barbara, Jessica thinks that the best way to reach young people is through a positive approach. Rather than promoting the health benefits of condoms and scaring young people with the threat of disease, she and her fellow interns create a local campaign based on skits that describe the fun of condom use in sexual situations. One of the more amusing skits involves a young woman attempting to put a condom on a banana and then on a large gourd while talking to the vegetable as if it were her naughty lover.

    Initially Jessica is delighted that the skits appear to be such a huge success. Enormous crowds gather, and the young men in the village seem to be especially delighted with the presentations. But the Muslim elders in the village meet secretly and decide that this nonsense has to be stopped. They demand that Jessica and the interns leave the village immediately and that the Clinton AIDS-Awareness Campaign be reprimanded for promoting immorality. New York staff members rush to Nigeria to deal with the crisis.

Question:

 You are in one of the following three groups:

    1. Sarah and the interns

    2. The Muslim village elders

    3. The NY staff of the Clinton Foundation

    Explain your position and see if it is possible to come to a compromise or a resolution of the conflict.